Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2001 > Mid-June 2001 Edition
I went to Fort Wayne this past Saturday (16 June). It was my first visit in over seven years. During my last time there seven years ago, a small employment firm specializing in Unix personnel had me interview for some position in Magnavox, which has a hugh plant in Fort Wayne. Not only was the interview a failure, but the interviewer failed to contact the employment firm (which was very displeased—at the interviewer, not at me!).
Anyway, my first visit was to the comics shop Books, Comics and Things. I remember it from its sponsorship of Doctor Who on the local PBS station before the BBC pulled the series off the market. So I decided to pay it a visit. It was difficult to find at first because its strip mall, Times Corners, is snakelike and the shop itself is invisible from the highway. What I found was your usual comics shop, like Von's Comics near Purdue but without the videotapes. Anyway, I bought a 12-sided die and a Usagi Yojimbo book.
Next, I saw this mall and tried to find the entrance through an L.S. Ayres department store, which I thought was connected to the mall. It was not. I left with some difficulty as the store was very crowded, and I was stopped at one point by a cologne salesperson. I managed to escape with a sample disk of some cologne called Lucky. ('Lucky'? Talk about running out of ideas for names!)
A bridge lets one part of a
computer's motherboard talk
with another, incompatible part.
Northbridge lets a computer's
processor talk to its memory
and expansion slots;
southbridge lets it talk to
the mechanical parts of the
computer like the keyboard,
mouse and hard disk.
Then I found the Borders book shop my niece raves about so much. Yes, it was a lot more spacious than the one I normally visit, but the shelves were a lot higher—so high you need ladders to reach the tops. I found a Lotus Notes book that is a lot less noisy and irrelevant than my previous purchase. I also found an O'Reilly book on PC hardware, that even explains what northbridge and southbridge mean.
Finally I drove home through Marion and realized that I needed to buy a Father's Day card for Padre. It was a little late for such a search (Father's Day was the following day), and I looked through four stores for a card that was neither stupid nor kitschy. In a Hallmark shop next to the Wal-Mart I found a nice, simple card with a jar of olives on the front and inside the message "Happy Father's Day from olive us". (cute.)
I think I'm finished with all these reinstalls of Red Hat Linux on my Madoka server. That point was reached with the install of the very latest versions of the web server Apache and the script language PHP. They both work very well, but where they are put are not Red Hat-compliant; and I must hand-set the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local so that Apache will start at boot-up. This is necessary, though, because Red Hat does not publish RPMs (Red Hat Package Modules) of Apache and PHP in a timely fashion.
I got the oil and lube changed in my car yesterday. With that I got two goodies: a rebate coupon and a Rand McNally road atlas. I gave the latter to my folks. I have no use for it myself, not for an atlas that shows every tiny hamlet around Fairmount—but not Fairmount itself!
ArsTechnica reviewed a nifty little computer called the Cappuccino. It's smaller than a trade paperback and weights less than two pounds. Yet, I could equip it as something more powerful than the two I have now. I'm talking out-of-the-way Linux server, or a new Win9x toy for the folks. And it sports a unique cooling system that keeps it from frying itself out.